soul brew coffee

Coffee /ˈkôfē,ˈkäfē/ noun
A liquid heaven, a survival juice, a second chance for the morning to fix itself, or for some, the most important meal of the day.

Here’s a coffee brand and webshop our graduate design team has created as part of the Visual Design course, in Fall, 2023.

We analyzed already existing specialty coffee brands to understand their design language. They use minimalistic lines and subtle colors, but dare to play with contrast, which provides elegance. A few of them had already started to package into boxes, and that opens up a new design-dimension. A few of these companies are mentioned below.

Based on research findings, we derived our target audience:
‍
People of the age 18+, mostly who prefer premium, well picked, flawless-quality coffee, from all over the world at a competitive price. And those who just want to have some fun, tasting amazing things.

It is trite to simply use the energizing aspect of coffee. A great cup of coffee really touches your soul. Drinking something warm makes you feel more comfortable and cheerful. We intended to build our brand around these feelings.

Building on the foundation we had created, we started to collect targeted inspiration for our brand. Selecting the best, we created the moodboard on the right, which served as a guide for the aesthetics, placing us into a certain mood.

We can see tons of natural color, that are rich, elegeant, but remain subtle enough. They show sophistication, and warmness, like a good cup of coffee. Our color palette mirrors them. There is a big emphasis on the typography. Typefaces like Analogue and Fitzgerald are also elegant, since they are Serif types, but they are not too sharp, having a bit of bubbly-ness, which can be related to fluids. Additionally, the collection provides the general mood and soul of coffee drinking.
‍
We used (Serif) Miller Banner as logo text and headings, for its sophistication, elegance and the perfect amount of bulkiness. As body text, we used (Sans Serif) Lato for its clean, simple, modern design, and its synergy with Miller Banner.

All the team members had created a few preliminary sketches, so we could decide on the direction, then I took over the logo design. We were talking a lot about how we could emphasize the motive of soul, and this is how we landed on the idea of meditation.
‍
So, I started to work on the idea, which is in the center of sketch examples. In order to make it work, many iterations were made. I did not want to use the coffee bean directly, and I intended to create a more cohesive, natural look, this is how I have come to the idea of drawing it as a continuous line, which reflects fluidity and elegance as well. It still has the sitting meditative posture, and the body shows not just a "thinking arm placement" but the curves of coffee bean too. In this line, we can find the letters S, B, and C, which are the starting letters of Soul Brew Coffee. I had to get rid of the "aura lines", to make it less busy, and after a few iterations on the head part, I decided on a simple circle due to the same considerations.

As a culmination of all the previous work, I had created product visualizations, experimenting with different package types and color combinations from our color palette. So we had enough content to fill up our webshop prototype.

After creating a User Journey map, and then low-fidelity wireframes, all the different elements of the project have met in the final webshop design, both desktop and mobile version.